Democrats'
'blue wave' may be in jeopardy as new polls suggest the bitter
confirmation battle of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh could
actually help Republicans; insight from former Clinton campaign chief
strategist Mark Penn.
Democratic
politicians appear eager to try and channel voter anger over the
confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to voter turnout in November.
The
realities are that Democrats have a better chance at regaining control
of the House than they do the Senate. They need to win 23 more seats to
take over the House. The hope is that women – already frustrated with
President Trump – turn out in droves for the midterms.
"I really
think this is going to drive women out to the polls in unprecedented
numbers," Katie Hill, a Democratic House candidate in California, said,
according to The Wall Street Journal.
Whit
Ayres, a Republican pollster, told The Journal that Christian
conservatives will be happy with Trump for his Supreme Court picks, but
he said the Democratic "enthusiasm in the midterms will go even higher
if that’s possible."
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D- Hawaii., who was an
outspoken critic of the former federal judge, told ABC’s ‘This Week’
that she is focused like a ‘laser beam’ on the upcoming elections.
"I'm
very focused on the here and now, which is that all these angry women,
mainly, out there who saw what was going on and how the Senate was not
able to deal with the entire issue of sexual assault," she said.
The
climactic 50-48 roll call on Saturday capped a fight that seized the
national conversation after claims emerged that he had sexually
assaulted women three decades ago — allegations he emphatically denied.
Those accusations transformed the clash from a routine struggle over
judicial ideology into an angry jumble of questions about victims’
rights, the presumption of innocence and personal attacks on nominees.
His
confirmation provides a defining accomplishment for Trump and the
Republican Party, which found a unifying force in the cause of putting a
new conservative majority on the court.
Republicans will
likely also use the Kavanaugh confirmation process to stir their base,
pointing at what they saw as a fundamentally flawed approach Democrats
took in handling sexual assault allegations against the nomination.
"Our
energy and enthusiasm was lagging behind theirs [Democrats] until
this," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., told "CBS
Sunday." "And I think this gave us the motivation and the opportunity to
have the kind of turnout in this off-year election that would help us
hold the Senate."
Some Democrats have already mentioned
investigating Kavanaugh if they regain control of the House. Rep. Ted.
Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Louis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., called for
impeachment proceedings in the event that an investigation proved
Kavanaugh lied while in front of Congress.
That investigation,
Democrats have said,
could well lead to impeachment proceedings. Federal judges can be
impeached by a simple majority of the House, but actually removing
Justice Kavanaugh from the bench would then require a two-thirds vote of
the Senate -- an extraordinarily unlikely scenario. No sitting U.S.
Supreme Court justice has ever been removed from the bench using this
mechanism.
Some Democrats appear to flinch at the prospect of seeking impeachment.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about the prospects of impeaching Kavanaugh, and she said it “would not be my plan.”
“I have enough people on my back wanting us to impeach the president,” Pelosi said, according to The Times.
Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law, Emeritus, at Harvard,
wrote on Fox News
that he hopes Democrats take over the House in November, and they act
“as an appropriate check and balance on the other branches rather than
as a revenge-driven Javert, the villain of “Les Miserables,” obsessed
with righting past wrongs rather than preventing future ones.”
Fox News' Gregg Re and The Associated Press contributed to this report
